Lunch + Barbara Hammer Book Launch

Barbara Hammer launches her first book with a reading from “Hammer!”, a memoir tracing her life and practise through its many twists and turns. Come early for a performance of her piece, Available Space, first presented in Toronto in 1979!



Abstract:

Barbara Hammer: Available Space (1979)

In the ‘70s, I used 16 mm films, slides, and audiotape in performances that I created with Terry Sendgraff under the team name Double Strength. While living with Terry in a small one bedroom Berkeley apartment, I had a dream “of Pyramid Lake, Nevada, of space, of freeing the rectangular film screen to a more liberated space, of escaping the confines of the frame, the ‘domestic house.’”[1] I went to Pyramid Lake on my BMW motorcycle with a 16mm camera, tripod, and 30-foot cable release on the back rack. Once there, I began to film images of myself tethered to the camera but exploring whatever I could find within the cable’s range. On the way back to California I saw several dilapidated houses that drew my attention. I went inside and filmed myself, pushing the edges of the frame in a metaphoric struggle to find some shape other than the proscriptive rectangle of the camera shutter and the screen. The film is broken into eight segments to be projected on different surfaces. When I performed this film, it was projected from a mobile table that I could roll through the space, twirling and tilting the projector. I projected the film on the walls, floors, and ceilings. I projected onto a corrugated metal garage door across the street from the gallery at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and out the door onto a bank of snow at A Space in Toronto. The last section of the film was projected onto a paper scroll with an image of me cutting through it. Then, in performance, I actually did cut through the paper and walk toward the projector, absorbing the light with my body until no image or light could be seen.

My strategy with Available Space was to make the audience move their bodies while watching film while at the same time presenting the idea that film could be more than a rectangle of projected light on a screen. The concept was that audience activity leads to political activity. By viewing outside the box, we might begin to see outside the box, to see other possibilities and try something new ourselves. As we move, twist, and turn, to see the projection, there is more blood circulating, more oxygen pumping, more brain activity in our bodies. When art stimulates us internally, we can learn to make better political and social judgments in the external world.[2]

[1] Description from Canyon Cinema online catalogue: www.canyoncinema.com.

[2] I also made films to be projected on 12-foot inflated and suspended weather balloons. The audience would walk around or lie under the balloon, seeing curved and sometimes doubled images: Moon Goddess (with Gloria Churchman, 1976) and Pond and Waterfall (1980).
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